And there is that infamous scene where Alex sings the titular song from a certain well-known Hollywood musical movie as he and his gang savagely attack a middle-aged writer and his wife. Kubrick presents Alex and his gang’s sheer atrocities with his own cold and detached attitude, and that makes this scene all the more chilling—especially when Alex gleefully stares at the writer (and us) right before raping the writer’s wife. The movie thankfully does not show everything, but the horror of what will soon happen to that poor woman is quite visceral to us, and we come to feel more repulsion than before.
However, as reflected by its first-person narration, the movie also seems to be forcing us into Alex’s sociopathic viewpoint. Usually aligning itself with whatever he heedlessly and sadistically revels in, the movie often finds itself on the verge of embracing his repellent nastiness, and it accordingly feels dangerously exciting at times. After all, violence in films is inherently stimulating in one way or another, and even Kubrick cannot entirely contain that artistic danger.
During its middle act, the movie attempts to argue that Alex’s individual violence is nothing compared to the systemic violence of his dystopian society. Not long after he is eventually arrested and then incarcerated, he happens to be selected for an experimental rehabilitation project promoted by the government, and then there comes another iconic moment of the film. Through a very twisted Pavlovian procedure, he is deprived of his free will in exchange of becoming virtually incapable of any kind of violence, and then he finds himself victimized a lot once he is released from the prison.
Are we supposed to be sorry for Alex around that point? What is inflicted onto him is cruel indeed, but we are also reminded of what a horrible criminal he is. When his “cured” status is presented in front of a bunch of important figures, he looks pitiful and helpless on the surface, but he does not deceive us at all. We can clearly sense that his violent nature still exists behind his seemingly passive face despite being artificially repressed for now, and we come to observe his following plight from the distance without much pity or care.
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